We live in interesting times!

Aster Data Systems has launched and our new website is up! Techcrunch is carrying an article about our technology. A few salient points from the article:

One of its first big customers is MySpace, which is running the database on a cluster of 100 server nodes to analyze what songs and videos are going viral, what features are becoming popular, and what content is being consumed on its service. That comes to more than one terabyte of new data every day that needs to be analyzed.

About the company, the founders and the financers:

Bawa and his co-founders were Ph.D students at Stanford when they founded the company in July, 2005. They raised an angel round of about $1 million in November, 2005 from Stanford computer science professor David Cheriton, Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital, Anand Rajaraman (founder of Junglee and Kosmix), and uber-angel Ron Conway. Cheriton was also one of the early angel investors in Google. Another Google investor, Sequoia Capital, took the entire A round in May, 2007. The company is not disclosing that round, but it is believed to be around $5 million.

Josh Kopelman explains why he invested in our company:

AsterData give companies deep insights on massive data by transforming off-the-shelf, commodity hardware into a powerful, self-managing, and scalable analytic database. Data analysis that previously took days to run (or were impossible to run) now routinely finish in minutes/hours. They already have paying customers today and Aster is in production managing billions of events per day.

Finally, the customer success story! Jim Benedetto, the SVP of Technology at MySpace, has this to say while endorsing Aster:

“With Aster, MySpace has the analytic horsepower and necessary scalability to meet our needs. The platform easily scales with our traffic growth and helps us better understand our users and improve their experience.”

As Mayank has said on our blog, we indeed live in interesting times!

Please visit our new website to learn more about our technology!

Aster Launch

My company, Aster Data Systems, will be launching in the coming weeks, and we’re all very excited about it. Aster Data Systems was co-founded by Mayank, Tasso and George, in the Computer Science department at Stanford University. We are developing scalable and high-performance data analytics solutions.

John Foley, a blogger for the Information Week, recently wrote about us.

I’ll post more about the company soon! Please keep checking…:)